Editorial | Kentucky public schools' education gains

Dr. Holliday

The academic performance of Kentucky's public school students is edging up, a testament to educators who have adopted new, more rigorous educational standards and are working to introduce them to students.

"We are making progress, though slower than we would like," Kentucky Education Commissioner Terry Holliday said last week as officials unveiled statewide test scores that showed overall improvement under a new testing system first used in the spring of 2012.

And so is Jefferson County, where the public schools showed improvement in key areas, including some impressive gains at seven of the district's 18 persistently low-achieving schools, a status that brings additional state scrutiny, The Courier-Journal's Antoinette Konz reported Friday.

This year, Jefferson County for the first time met the annual performance goal set by the state Department of Education.

And statewide, the high school graduation rate increased, student performance improved and more students graduated ready for college and careers.

This year's gains are welcome news, especially after the sticker shock of last year's startlingly low results that followed the first year of statewide testing under the new Kentucky Core Academic Standards. Those are new, much tougher educational standards based on the Common Core standards some 45 states have adopted to try to better prepare students for college and careers.

Kentucky was the first state to adopt the Common Core standards and educators should be congratulated for moving so quickly. So should lawmakers who passed Senate Bill 1 in 2009, the first major effort to upgrade education in Kentucky since the landmark Kentucky Educational Reform Act of 1990.

But neither Dr. Holliday nor Jefferson County School Superintendent Donna Hargens, who just finished two years as head of the state's largest school system, is celebrating. Nor should they be.

"We are very proud of the progress we have made but we still have a large mountain to climb, " Dr. Hargens said.

Both acknowledge much work remains to be done to bring overall scores higher in key areas of reading, mathematics, science, social studies, language and writing and to show that more students are "proficient"- a ranking that shows they are mastering subjects on which they are tested.

Kentucky's goal is 100 percent proficiency for all students.

Statewide, students are at the mid-range when it comes to being considered proficient or distinguished, the top category of performance.

For example, 56 percent of Kentucky's high school students reached those categories for reading and only about 36 percent for math and science.

In Jefferson County, 52 percent of high school students scored proficient or better in reading and 41 percent in math.

JCPS officials already are using the results of this year to target areas of improvement for next year. For example, troubled by a drop in reading scores at the elementary school level, they are working to recruit more community volunteers for the "Everyone Reads" project that pairs adult volunteers with children who need extra help in reading.

And they are using a project within schools called "Professional Learning Communities" where teachers collaborate on strategies to help individual students succeed in their area of study.

Dr. Holliday, who touched off a firestorm last year when he described Jefferson County's worst performing schools as "academic genocide," struck a more positive tone Friday appearing with Dr. Hargens at a press event to announce Jefferson County's results.

Friday, he noted the improvement within the Jefferson County schools and rightly urged parents and the community to step up support for the schools, teachers and principals.

The Kentucky General Assembly needs to do its part as well, including standing fast on the Common Core standards, and the companion Next Generation Science Standards.

Some groups have stirred up a lot of sound and fury about the standards, falsely labeling them a "federal government takeover" and attacking the science standards because they call for teaching evolution without creationism, the Biblical account that God created the world.

Lawmakers started Kentucky public schools on this new path in 2009 when they adopted SB 1. They need to get out of the way and give it a chance to work.

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Editorial | Kentucky public schools' education gains

The academic performance of Kentucky's public school students is edging up, a testament to educators who have adopted new, more rigorous educational standards and are working to introduce them to